Few French films in the ’70s caused more of a ruckus than this horny, hilarious smack in the face to the establishment, featuring Gerard Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere as a pair of charismatic, animalistic drifters stealing and screwing their way across the French countryside. Adapted from his own novel by Bertrand Blier, this landmark assault on bourgeois materialism provides Blier’s signature off-kilter whimsy at every unexpected turn, as the anarchic attached-at-the-hip duo (the “testicles” of the film’s original French title, Les Valseuses) do the Kerouac-ian shake, aided by three of France’s most amazing actresses of any era: Miou-Miou, Isabelle Hupert and Jeanne Moreau, who caps her role with a scene that still potently shocks forty years on. Just as seismic as the film’s attitude towards middle-class morality is its impossibly cool editing rhythms — throughout, we pop in and out of emotional and physical transitions as seismically as Lawrence of Arabia’s blowing-out-a-match-becomes-the-sunrise. Silly, sad, vicious, and tender, this is Blier at his finest, best seen with an audience courtesy of this 35mm print flown in directly from France!
Dir. Bertrand Blier, 1974, 35mm, 113 min.